The baby has arrived

We are so thrilled to announce the arrival of our baby girl, Mercedes. It was quite the ordeal to get her here, but mother and baby are doing just great. I'll go ahead and share the story from my perspective and perhaps in a couple days you can all get Brittney's perspective (which will be much more painful than mine).
I'll go ahead and start on Monday when we went and had our last checkup with the OB. As you all know, the official due date was last Saturday, June 27. When we went in, Brittney was dilated to about a 3 and was a good 85-90% effaced. The doctor was sure that she would likely go into labor at any time, but went ahead and scheduled an inducement date for Thursday, which was great because we didn't want to have to wait until after the 4th of July weekend to have the baby. The OB went ahead and stripped Brittney's membranes for a second time (it had been done the previous week) and told us he wasn't sure we'd even last until Thursday and that he planned on seeing us at the hospital that night as he was the doctor on call. When we arrived home, we got a call from the doctor saying that UVRMC was booked solid for Thursday so he thought we would stand a better chance of getting Brittney induced on Wednesday, when they had fewer planned c-sections and other inducements. We agreed without any hesitation to have the baby on Wednesday, July 3.
On Tuesday, we welcomed Brittney's mom into our home and Brittney enjoyed a day with her mom and her sister Brynn. On Tuesday evening around 8pm, Brittney started having pretty strong and painful contractions. Typically they were separated by 10-20 minute intervals, not close enough to go into the hospital. We decided to pass some time by playing one of the only games I can convince Brittney to play with me, Syzygy (it is like speed Scrabble -- for those who have never played the game, I would highly recommend it). The contractions continued into the night and kept Brittney up the entire night and me up for most of the night. The contractions hadn't quite gotten to the 3-5 minute interval stage when they recommend you go into the hospital, but Brittney was in so much pain that we decided that it may be helpful to walk around our apartment complex for a bit, that was around 2:30am. After walking a bit, Brittney had decided that she was in too much pain and that we were going to go to the hospital. We grabbed the bag Brittney had packed several days earlier and headed out.
We arrived at the hospital around 3am and Brittney was immediately admitted. The hospital wasn't too busy and they took us to a room and placed a contraction monitor and a heart beat monitor on Brittney's stomach. Because Brittney was in so much pain she asked that they check her immediately and see if she could get the epidural started. Unfortunately, she was only dilated to a 3 and so they decided to monitor her for the next hour and would consult with the doctor to see if they would send her back home. After the hour was up they decided to keep her at the hospital and around finally around 5:30 to 6am they placed the epidural. Let me tell you, that was a huge relief! Brittney was finally able to relax a little and get some much needed sleep. She was able to sleep on the very comfy hospital bed while I got to attempt to sleep and a very uncomfy recliner. I am sure it was the only time during the whole procedure that Brittney was more comfortable than I was, and deservedly so.
Brittney continued to progress fairly quickly and by 11:30 or so had dilated to a 7. About that same time, the doctor arrived on the scene and decided to break Brittney's water, which had yet to occur. Around 12:30 they checked her again and she was fully dilated. The nurses checked in with the doctor and the doctor gave the go ahead to have her start pushing. Brittney had been complaining since she was dilated to a 7 that she was starting to feel her contractions again and that she had regained quite a bit of feeling in her legs, which shouldn't have been the case with the epidural. The anesthesiologist decided that she just needed an extra couple dosages to alleviate the pain. It seemed to help a bit, but as we would learn later, her epidural had become displaced and was not functioning properly. By the end of the birth, Brittney could basically feel everything that was going on - it was difficult on her to say the least.
Since we hadn't gone to any prenatal or birthing classes, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect during the process. Since Brittney had witnessed a couple of births herself during her clinical rotations, she explained things to me a couple times and helped me to know what to expect. Even if we had gone to a birthing class, I don't think it would have prepared me for the final stage of the birth. For the first 30-45 minutes, Brittney did very well and the pain wasn't too substantial. After that, things went downhill very quickly. Things started to become very painful, Brittney started clutching to the side of the bed as she pushed and tried to forget the pain and push as hard as she could. Finally the pain become too much so the nurse called the anesthesiologist who was stuck in a c-section and would not show up for another 30 minutes, when it would be too late to do anything. I could go into many more details about this stage, but for everyone's sake I'll stop there and say that after nearly 2 hours of pushing and after enduring more pain than I think she could ever withstand, Brittney gave birth to a beautiful 8 pound 2 ounce, 20.5" baby on July 1 at 2:33pm!
We have decided to name her Mercedes Nicole Trayner (thanks for sharing your name Nicole - you nearly shared your birthday as well). She is such a doll and we are so happy to have her a part of our life. We love her so much already and are so thankful for her. The tears just started to stream down my face when I was finally able to see her. She has a beautiful head of dark brown hair, though we're not sure where she got all that dark hair (Nicole as well???). I'd also like to thank you all for your love and support. Now to the good stuff...some pictures (I know that most of you will probably skip over the novel of a post I just created and look only at the pictures).